Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

The previously mentioned management plugin is now in a state where it's worth looking at and testing. In order to make this easy, I've made a special once-only binary release just for the management plugin (in future we'll make binary releases of it just like the other plugins). Download all the .ez files from here and install them as described here, then let us know what you think. (Update 2010-09-22: Note that the plugins referenced in this blog post are for version 2.0.0 of RabbitMQ. We've now released 2.1.0 - for this and subsequent versions you can get the management plugin from here).

After installation, point your browser at http://server-name:55672/mgmt/. You will need to authenticate as a RabbitMQ user (on a fresh installation the user "guest" is created with password "guest"). From here you can manage exchanges, queues, bindings, virtual hosts, users and permissions. Hopefully the UI is fairly self-explanatory.

The management UI is implemented as a single static HTML page which makes background queries to the HTTP API. As such it makes heavy use of Javascript. It has been tested with recent versions of Firefox, Chromium and Safari, and with versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer back to 6.0. Lynx users should use the HTTP API directly 🙂

The management plugin will create an HTTP-based API at http://server-name:55672/api/. Browse to that location for more information on the API. For convenience the documentation can also be obtained from our Mercurial server.

WARNING:The management plugin is still at an early stage of development. You should be aware of the following limitations:

Permissions are only enforced sporadically. If a user can authenticate with the HTTP API, they can do anything.

Installing the management plugin will turn on fine-grained statistics in the server. This can slow a CPU-bound server by 5-10%.

All sorts of other features may be missing or buggy. See the TODO file for more information.

Note: if you want to build the plugin yourself, you should be aware that right now the Erlang client does not work in the default branch, so you need a mix of versions. The following commands should work:

For a long time the management and monitoring capabilities built into RabbitMQ have consisted of rabbitmqctl. While it's a reasonable tool for management (assuming you like the command line), rabbitmqctl has never been very powerful as a monitoring tool. So we're going to build something better.

Of course, plenty of people don't like command line tools and so several people have built alternate means of managing RabbitMQ. Alice / Wonderland and Spring AMQP are two that leap to mind. However there isn't much standardisation, and people don't always find it very convenient to talk to Rabbit via epmd. So we're going to build something easier.

With that in mind, I'd like to announce the existence of RabbitMQ Management. This is a plugin to provide management and monitoring via a RESTful interface, with a web GUI. Think of it as being like a super-Alice, and also an integration point for any other tools that people want to build.

So RabbitMQ Management will allow easier management and better monitoring. How better? Well, as part of the upcoming rabbit release we've added a statistics gathering feature to the broker. This can count messages as they're published, routed, delivered and acked, on a per channel / queue / exchange basis, so we can determine things like which channels are publishing fast or consuming slowly, which queues are being published to from which exchanges, which connections and hosts are busiest, and so on.

Of course, doing all this extra bookkeeping comes at a cost; when statistics gathering is turned on the server can run around 10% slower (assuming it's CPU-bound; which usually means handling transient messages. If it's IO bound the performance impact will likely be less). At the moment statistics gathering is turned on automatically when the management plugin is installed but we'll make it configurable.

With that, I'd like to add a warning: it's currently at a very early stage of development, and really should not be trusted for anything other than experimentation and playing with. The REST API will change, the UI will change, the plugin might crash your server, and the TODO is currently almost hilariously long. But hopefully this gives you an idea of what we're going to do.